Telephone Out-Patient Appointments and #disadvantage -a thread.

Since March I’ve (mostly) been conducting out-patient appointments by phone. I was worried that this might exaggerate health-inequalities that are frequent in #COPD so I ran a small audit of 112 consecutive calls...

First off, people should have been expecting my call as we sent a text if we had a mobile number, or a letter if all we had was a landline. I called as close to the appointment time as possible, not more than 5 mins earlier, but sometimes I ran a little late. What happened?

Well, of 112 calls, I couldn’t reach 38%. Usually it just rang and rang. (BTW, does anyone have an easy way of avoiding the ‘withheld’ number dialling out from a hospital?). This isn’t a great success rate, although not that different from the DNA rate in clinic.

I used IMD quartile to look at deprivation and there was no association between call success and IMD. Older people were easier to reach (63 vs. 57 years p=0.03) and there were trends to more men than women (71% vs. 54% p=0.08) and new than follow-up (78% vs. 57% p=0.09).

There was no difference between vs. . This leaves me with a remaining concern about whether English as a first language might be a factor? I’m not sure the results are what I was expecting.

Summary: I didn’t have any more success reaching people by phone than I do encouraging them to see me in person. But from this sample of 112?patients, using the phone doesn’t seem to exaggerate non-language IMD #healthinequality in COPD...

I do, however, need to think more about how to increase call success, particularly for follow-up appointments with younger female patients.

What has your experience been?